Digital forensics is a branch of forensic science which includes activities like identifying, recovering, investigating, validating, and presenting facts relating to digital evidence located on computers or any other similar digital storage media device (David, 2018). However, many people often think of these terms in connection with cop shows they normally see on TV, without knowing that digital forensic involves much more than they can ever think of (Finjan Team, 2018). In this paper, we are going to look at how to set up a digital forensic program and the importance of setting up a digital forensic program in an organization.
To start with, the best time an organization can set up a digital forensic program within the organization is that time before the organization experiences a breach. IT and security managers within the organization are required to make certain decisions. It has reached a point where security and IT managers are in a despair position of getting to understand more the world of digital forensics, which in simple terms can be defined as the ability to be in a position of tracking down the source of network intrusion, an exploit like ransomware.
Digital forensics can also be associated with other incidences like a case where an unauthorized person gains access to a network to steal data, or cause other damages to the system (David, 2018). Digital forensics is made up of a wide range of skills such as a “CSI”-type investigator who is well equipped with law enforcement knowledge, or at least has the knowledge on what entails collecting and preserving evidence that might prove useful in a courtroom as part of the criminal complaint.
The evidence is key in digital forensics as it could offer support to legal discovery as part of the regulatory compliance violation. The main of the digital forensics is to examine a breach ad come up with the necessary compilation of evidence relating to the happenings. Digital forensics has become important among many organizations as the chances of getting breached increase day by day (David, 2018). Therefore, there is a need for organizations to be ready for legal actions in case any breach occurs, and be ready for the consequences that come with a breach. Digital forensics, incident response (DFIR) utilizes a variety of security tools and different approaches. Such approaches include: being in a position of reversing-engineer malware, discovering malicious files and being able to investigate the memory of a computer and digital documents for threats and infections (David, 2018). These tools that are used in digital forensics are utilized before the breach, and also after the happening of the breach.
The second section of this paper will be the importance of setting up a digital forensics program. Just like in the physical world where we leave our traces like fingerprints and hairs wherever we go and interacting with people, the same implies to activities in the digital world. There are digital traces that are often left behind when we interact with digital devices. Think of traces like activity logs, file fragments, timestamps among others may have a crucial role to play in the world of digital forensics (Finjan Team, 2018). Such traces might appear to be useful as they can be used as evidence to establish the origins of a document, or for the legal purposes in determining the activities of the parties that were involved in the criminal case. Whenever an activity is performed in a particular computer system and networks often leave behind certain kind of ‘digital fingerprint’. Such evidence can be found in different web browsers, document metadata, back up files and email headers.
